Artifactory binary repository management system. As one of the most widely used binary repositories and the only repository that offers a high availability clustered solution, the integration with Artifactory helps customers easily adopt CA Release Automation to optimize their entire software development lifecycle.
“Artifactory is a standard maker at the continuous-integration domain and provides the user a powerful repository experience with the freedom to choose his own tools set and ecosystem. We are happy to promote the integration with CA Release Automation and offer CA customers High Available repository to support their deployment and continuous delivery flow,» said Shlomi Ben Haim, JFrog CEO.
Archivo mensual: mayo 2015
Cloud playing a more significant role in day to day work for SMB employees
(c)iStock.com/robuart
Workers in small to medium businesses (SMBs) feel happier and more productive when using cloud apps in their day to day work, according to new research from Kronos.
The study, which focused on 1000 European knowledge workers in SMBs, notes how late many small businesses are in moving to the cloud, arguing SMB leaders are “yet to realise [its] strategic value”. Yet almost two thirds (63%) believe the majority of their work will be carried out through cloud apps by 2020.
The importance of a productive working atmosphere is key, according to the report. Employees are more likely to expect reliable software (86%) or hardware (84%) than a competitive salary (75%).
Workforce flexibility was the most important benefit of cloud apps for employers, with 58% of the vote, followed by cost savings (49%) and increased agility (48%). For employees, this swapped to flexibility (91%), real-time access (89%) and quicker software updates (84%). When it came to deciding a particular piece of cloud software, speed of use (95%) was the most important factor, followed by the security of the company (90%), security of data (89%) and simplicity (88%).
Despite the overall feeling of small businesses adapting more readily to cloud, there is still plenty of work to do. Only a third (34%) of those polled believe they are getting either ‘maximum’ or ‘great’ value from their cloud applications, while three in five (61%) believe their firm needs a more definitive policy on the way cloud apps are used by employees.
Kronos argues the next few years are “critical” for SMBs as they will be forced to gain a further grip on cloud technologies. The key, the firm argues, is to establish clear guidelines on usage, ensuring employees are more productive while secure at the same time.
This is something we’ve heard in the past, of course, but the tide is turning: 83% of respondents said that, given the opportunity, they would prefer to use cloud apps over their on-premise equivalents.
EMC World 2015: Event Recap
After EMC World 2015, I’m languishing in airports today in post-conference burnout – an ideal time to deliver a report on the news, announcements and my prognostications on what this means to our business.
The big announcements were delivered in General Sessions on Monday (EMC Information Infrastructure & VCE) and on Tuesday (Federation: VMware & Pivotal). The Federation announcements are more developer and futures oriented, although important strategically, so I’ll pass on that for now.
EMC and VCE have updated their converged and Hyperconverged products pretty dramatically. Yes, VSPEX Blue is Hyperconverged, however unfortunate the name is in linking an EVO:RAIL solution to a reference architecture solution.
The products can be aligned as:
- Block
- Rack
- Appliances
The VCE Vblock product line adheres to its core value proposition closely.
- Time from order to completely deployed on the data center floor in 45 days. (GreenPages will provide the Deploy & Implementation services. We have three D&I engineers on staff now.)
- Cross component Unified upgrade through a Release Candidate Matrix – every single bit of hardware is tested in major and minor upgrades to insure compatibility: storage, switch, blade, add-ons (RecoverPoint, Avamar, VPLEX).
- Unified support – one call to VCE, not to all the vendors in the build
However, VCE is adding options and variety to make the product less monolithic.
- VXblock – this is the XtremIO version, intended for large VDI or mission critical transactional deployments (trading, insurance, national healthcare claims processing). The Beast is a Vblock of eight 40 TB Xbrick nodes, 320 TB before dedupe and compression, or nearly 2 PB with realistic data reduction. Yes, that is Two Petabytes of All Flash Array. Remote replication is now totally supported with RecoverPoint.
- VXRack – this is a Vblock without an array, but it isn’t VSAN either. It is….ScaleIO, a software storage solution that pools server storage into a shared pool. The minimum configuration is 100 compute nodes, which can be dense performance (4 node form factor in 2 U chassis) or capacity. The nodes can be bare metal or hypervisor of any sort. This can scale to 328 Petabytes. Yes, Petabytes. This is web-scale, but they call it “Rack Scale” computing (first generation). More on that later…
- Vscale – Networking! This is Leaf and Spine networking in a rack to tie a VXrack or Vblock deployment together, at scale. “One Ring to Rule Them All”. This is big, literally. Imagine ordering a petabyte installation of VXblock, VXrack and Vscale, and rolling it onto the floor in less than two months.
So, that is Block and Rack. What about Appliance?
Enter VSPEX Blue, the EMC implementation of EVO:RAIL. This has definite value in…
- Pricing
- Unified management & support
- The “app store” with
- integrated backup (VDPA)
- replication (vRPA)
- Cloud Array integration (TwinStrata lives!), a virtual iSCSI controller that will present cloud storage to the system as a backup target or a capacity tier.
This post from Mike Colson provides a good explanation.
Future apps will include virus scanning, links to Public IaaS and others.
I set one up in the lab in 15 minutes, as advertised, although I had to wait for the configuration wizard to churn away after I initialized it and input all the networking. Professional Services will be required, as EMC is requiring PS to implement. Our team is and will be prepared to deploy this. We can discuss how this compares to other Hyperconverged appliances. Contact us for more information.
There are other announcements, some in sheer scale and some in desirable new features.
Data Domain Beast: DD9500, 58.7 TB/hr. and 1.7 PB of capacity. This is rated at 1.5x the performance and 4x the scalability of the nearest competitor.
VPLEX News: The VPLEX Witness can now be deployed in the public Cloud (naturally EMC recommends the EMC Hybrid Cloud or vCloud Air). The Witness has to be outside the fault domains of any protected site, so where better than the Cloud? It is a very lightweight VM.
CloudArray (TwinStrata’s Cloud Array Controller) is integrated with VPLEX. You can have a distributed volume spanning on premise and cloud storage. I’m still trying to grasp the significance of this. The local cache for the CloudArray controller can be very fast, so this isn’t limited to low latency applications. The things you could do…
VPLEX is now available in a Virtual Edition (VPLEX/VE). This will obviously come with some caveats and restrictions, but this also is a fantastic new option for smaller organizations looking for the high availability that VPLEX provides, as well as data mobility and federation of workloads across metro distances.
VVOL: Chuck Hollis (@chuckhollis) led an entertaining and informative ‘Birds of a Feather’ session for VVOLs. Takeaway – this is NOT commonly deployed yet. Only a handful of people have even set it up, and mostly for test. This was in a room with at least 150 people, so high interest, but low deployment. Everyone sees the potential and is looking forward to real world policy based deployments on industry standard storage. This is an emerging technology that will be watched closely.
VNX/VNXe: I didn’t see or hear many striking features or upgrades in this product line, but an all flash VNXe was trumpeted. I’ll be looking at the performance and design specifications of this more closely to see how it might fit targeted use cases or general purpose storage for SMB and commercial level customers. There is talk around the virtualization of the VNX array, as well as Isilon, so pretty soon nearly every controller or device in the EMC portfolio will be available as a virtual appliance. This leads me to…
ViPR Controller and ViPR SRM: Software Defined Storage
ViPR Controller is definitely a real product with real usefulness. This is the automation and provisioning tool for a wide variety of infrastructure elements, allowing for creation of virtual arrays with policy based provisioning, leveraging every data service imaginable: dedupe, replication, snapshots, file services, block services and so on.
ViPR SRM is the capacity reporting and monitoring tool that provides the management of capacity that is needed in an SDS environment. This is a much improved product with a very nice GUI and more intuitive approach to counters and metrics.
I’d recommend a Storage Transformation Workshop for people interested in exploring how SDS can change the way (and cost) of how you manage your information infrastructure.
More on EVO:RAIL/VSPEX Blue
I met with Mike McDonough, the mastermind behind EVO:RAIL. He is indeed a mastermind. The story of the rise of EVO:RAIL as a separate business unit is interesting enough (300 business cases submitted, 3 approved, and he won’t say what the other mystery products are), but the implementation and strategy and vision are what matter to us. The big factor here was boiling down the support cases to come up with the 370 most common reasons for support, all around configuration, management and hardware. The first version of EVO:RAIL addressed 240 of those issues. Think of this as having a safety rail around a vSphere appliance to prevent these common and easily avoidable issues, without restricting the flexibility too much. The next version will incorporate NSX, most likely. Security and inspection are the emphases for the next iteration. Partners and distributors were chosen carefully. GreenPages is one of only 9 national partners chosen for this, based on our long history as a strategic partner and our thought leadership! The tightly controlled hardware compatibility list is a strength, as future regression tests for software and other upgrades will keep the permutations down to a minimum. (By the way, the EMC server platform is Intel, for VxRack, VSPEX Blue and I think for all of their compute modules for all their products). The implication here, competitively, is that as competitive appliances that are buying white box hardware with commodity contracts allowing for flexibility in drives, memory and CPU, will have an exponentially more difficult task in maintain the increasing permutations of hardware versions over time.
Final Blue Sky note:
Rack Scale is an Intel initiative that promises an interesting future for increased awareness of the hardware for hypervisors, but is a very future leaning project. Read Scott Lowe’s thoughts on this.
As always, contact us for more details and in-depth conversations about how we can help you build the data center of the future, today.
By Randy Weis, Practice Manager, Information Infrastructure
Storage Industry Innovation and Disruption | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
The real battle for the future of the storage market will be between Tier 1 incumbents and hyperscale cloud providers like Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), and Google (Drive) that have novel business models, address new customers, and take new cost structures into account. For this reason, they are the true industry disruptors and the ones most likely to succeed in an era of transformation.
The storage industry is in the midst of a major transformation that will forever change its economics. Lower cost, higher performance, on-premise storage and nearly free cloud-based storage are driving both innovation and disruption in the industry.
Culture Shock By @MJannery | @CloudExpo [#SDN #Cloud]
When the melting pot boils down to it, our network is its own culture, with recurring traffic patterns, similar end users, and equipment named after inside jokes only your company will understand. Just like living within your own culture, it’s important to not only understand HOW patterns develop, but WHY as well.
When troubleshooting a network, it’s important to know what tasks it performs on a daily basis. Denise Fishburne, a 30 year network engineer, highlights three areas to consider when finding a problem in the network.
The article was a quick read, but the points she argues make it worth the look. I thought Denise, or «Fish» as she is referred to in the article, gives great explanations of her three areas using similes and metaphors.
Software Defined Networking | Part 3 By @MJannery | @CloudExpo [#SDN #Cloud]
It is possible to implement SDN solely using existing network infrastructure and to provide SDN overlay connectivity using tunneling technologies. That said, most people concede that some physical hardware will be needed to perform certain key network functions or at key locations within the network. Fortunately there are a growing number of physical network appliances which are SDN conversant and can form an integral part of an SDN deployment. The most widespread SDN southbound protocol being OpenFlow and many hardware vendors now provide switches, routers, etc. offering OpenFlow APIs including Cisco, Brocade, A10, Extreme, HP and many other mainstream network hardware vendors. For proprietary SDN solutions (such as Cisco ACI) the vendor’s own kit is mandated.
Intelligent Infrastructure Exposed By @JamesCarlini | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Getting a second perspective based on several decades of diversified experience can only fortify your decisions on strategically applying technology to your organization.
With demands on enterprise systems changing so fast, most organizations’ architectures and frameworks of Intelligent Infrastructure are in a stressful state. Many are focused on trying to maintain obsolete systems and few are willing to make a major investment in change. What was considered state-of-the-art two or three years ago can be obsolete today.
Tune into the Cloud: Price Tag By @GregorPetri | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
One of the most famous quotes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is “Your Margin is My Opportunity”. This illustrates nicely how in the world of Amazon (and in the words of UK’s pop idol Jessie J*): “It’s not about the money³, we do not need your money³, we just wanna make the world dance!”
In the cloud this – a bit unworldly – attitude is fairly normal. Think of Facebook buying WhatsApp for about $ 16 billion, only to make it available for free to large parts of the world via Internet.org. For more traditional competitors this kind of “semi-philanthropic” way of doing business takes some time getting used to.
Delivering Value with BizDevOps By @GabrielLowy1 | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
Companies are rapidly adopting DevOps practices to create higher-quality software faster and more efficiently to improve customer experience, lower IT costs and enhance productivity. But the key to success for software-driven businesses is delivering value with
BizDevOps.
Using both lean and agile methodologies, DevOps brings software development, IT operations and quality assurance (QA) teams together to create a more collaborative process to deliver software and services in a faster and more continuous fashion. DevOps aims to break down IT and organizational data silos by promoting a culture of shared resources that make change and state processes across the entire application delivery chain more transparent. The end result is continuous delivery, an operational concept that is crucial to the software-defined business.
Data Storage Corp to Present at @CloudExpo | @DataStorageCorp [#Cloud]
Chuck Piluso will present a study of cloud adoption trends and the power and flexibility of IBM Power and Pureflex cloud solutions.
Speaker Bio: Prior to Secure Infrastructure and Services, Mr. Piluso founded North American Telecommunication Corporation, a facilities-based Competitive Local Exchange Carrier licensed by the Public Service Commission in 10 states, serving as the company’s chairman and president from 1997 to 2000.
Between 1990 and 1997, Mr. Piluso served as chairman & founder of International Telecommunications Corporation, a facilities-based international carrier licensed by the Federal Communications Commission. Mr. Piluso founded ITC in 1990 and grew it from two to 135 employees with $170 million in revenues in 1997. The company had operations and agreements in many countries including Russia, Israel, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Dominican Republic, Chile and Canada. During his tenure, Mr. Piluso grew the company to the fifth largest facilities-based international carrier in the USA within five years. Mr. Piluso’s career in the telecommunications industry began in 1978 when he joined ITT Corporation’s Telephone Equipment Division.